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Why do professionals talk so much about debug time?

After learning java for a couple years now, I haven't ever had the issue of tremendous amounts of debugging time. Is this something that will come in time or do people just exaggerate? Are they talking more so about logic errors and how long it takes to spot them? Thanks

Debugging time should be really small provided that sufficient time was spent on testing.

Debugging is the process of finding the errors in the code that you missed finding during testing.

"Debugging is the process of finding the errors in the code that you missed finding during testing." - That is not true, during your testing you may find bugs that need to be debugged to figure out what is causing the problem. You can't fix a bug just by testing, so they go hand in hand. Debugging is simply just the process of using the debugger..

Debugging time is not guaranteed to be small either, and especially for larger projects because there is a lot more to consider when trying to figure out what might be causing a particular problem. Depending on the complexity of the fix, this may introduce more testing and debugging as well.

Testing may provide hints as to where you should start debugging, but that won't mean debugging will be an easy task after plenty of testing necessarily. Debugging can still be a time consuming adventure regardless.

"Debugging is the process of finding the errors in the code that you missed finding during testing." - That is not true, during your testing you may find bugs that need to be debugged to figure out what is causing the problem. You can't fix a bug just by testing, so they go hand in hand. Debugging is simply just the process of using the debugger.

The errors you find and fix during testing are a part of the normal testing process. For it to be debugging implies that the code has already passed testing and is live. You will probably find lots of errors that need fixing during the testing process but they are not bugs unless they are still there once the code goes live.

There should be a lesser requirement to search for where the error is during testing than there is for locating a bug as the test that produces the error should be testing a specific section of the code and so most of the time the cause of the error will be in that particular section of code whereas a bug could be anywhere and so the first step in debugging is to try to locate the portion of code it is in.

The process for fixing errors found during testing is similar to but not identical to the process you use for debugging. With debugging you have the additional time constraint that it needs to be fixed yesterday and so the solution is often to apply a patch that would be completely unacceptable had the error been found during testing. During testing there is more time available for fixing and so it can be fixed properly instead of just being patched.

You can use the debugger using testing and you can debug without using the debugger. That it is called a debugger does not mean that it can only be used for debugging.

Debugging time should be really small provided that sufficient time was spent on testing.

Debugging is the process of finding the errors in the code that you missed finding during testing.

Originally Posted by felgall

The errors you find and fix during testing are a part of the normal testing process. For it to be debugging implies that the code has already passed testing and is live. You will probably find lots of errors that need fixing during the testing process but they are not bugs unless they are still there once the code goes live.

There should be a lesser requirement to search for where the error is during testing than there is for locating a bug as the test that produces the error should be testing a specific section of the code and so most of the time the cause of the error will be in that particular section of code whereas a bug could be anywhere and so the first step in debugging is to try to locate the portion of code it is in.

The process for fixing errors found during testing is similar to but not identical to the process you use for debugging. With debugging you have the additional time constraint that it needs to be fixed yesterday and so the solution is often to apply a patch that would be completely unacceptable had the error been found during testing. During testing there is more time available for fixing and so it can be fixed properly instead of just being patched.

You can use the debugger using testing and you can debug without using the debugger. That it is called a debugger does not mean that it can only be used for debugging.

"You can use the debugger using testing and you can debug without using the debugger. That it is called a debugger does not mean that it can only be used for debugging." - But this was already my point.

debuging is great technique to find and remove the error in the code. so which really helpful in creating and designing the sites. so that's why the professional take look about the debug time. it's also know as testing which they made in prgramming. the manual debuging can take a bit time. that's why the professionals are interested in it cause of their work and quality of their work.